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PSED Analysis Using the U.S. Datasets

Kelly Shaver, College of Charleston

and

Diana Hechavarria, University of South Florida

Saturday, August 8, 1:00 pm to 3:00 PM

Vancouver Convention Center, Room 216

In the United States, the PSED (both PSED I and PSED II) are the only datasets (out of the 57 listed by the US Small Business Administration) that contain any significant detail about the founders of new ventures.  Some of the others identify general demographic characteristics of the founder, but none include information about the founder's background, experience, and personal motivations.  The PSED has served as the model for several others, including the Swedish PSED, the Chinese PSED, and the CAUSEE done in Australia.  For this reason, the PSED is (a) an extremely important dataset on its own, and (b) an excellent introduction to the structure of other national datasets based on the PSED.

The PSED studies have four important advantages for scholars interested in the creation of new ventures.  First, the data in both PSED studies can be weighted so that conclusions drawn from research are nationally representative (similar weighting schemes are present in the comparable datasets of other countries).  Second, there is a clear operational definition of who is, and who is not, a nascent entrepreneur (as opposed, for example, to a new firm).  Third, the fact that each dataset contains multiple years of information from the same respondents allows researchers to discover which ventures are still being organized, which have become new firms, and which have been discontinued. Fourth, PSED 1 contains a nationally representative comparison group of people who are not in the process of starting new businesses.  Thus within one dataset, it is possible to determine which personal characteristics distinguish nascent entrepreneurs from all other people.

Because the workshop is hands-on, participants are URGED to bring their own laptop computers containing some version of SPSS.  (The PSED data files are also available in a SAS version, but the workshop will be conducted in SPSS.) Topics covered will include the overall structure of the datasets, procedures for combining the datasets, the development of syntax files for analysis, choices of particular demographic variables to use, the selection of variables, and the proper renormalization of weights.  In addition, participants in this workshop will leave with a flash drive containing all the PSED datasets, SPSS syntax files designed to clean and renormalize the individual datasets, and PDF versions of the PowerPoint slides from the workshop.  

NOTE:  This workshop requires registration but carries no fee.  Please write Kelly Shaver (shaverk@cofc.edu) for the registration code.

Kelly G. Shaver

Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies

Department of Management & Entrepreneurship

School of Business

College of Charleston

Physical address: 5 Liberty Street, Room 331, Charleston, SC 29401

Web page: http://sb.cofc.edu/academicdepartments/management/faculty-staff-listing/shaver.php

Also Member of the Graduate Faculty, Medical University of South Carolina

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